reprepro manual

This manual documents reprepro, a tool to generate and administer Debian package repositories.
Other useful resources:

Table of contents

Sections of this document:

Introduction

What reprepro does

Reprepro is a tool to take care of a repository of Debian packages (.dsc,.deb and .udeb). It installs them to the proper places, generates indices of packages (Packages and Sources and their compressed variants) and of index files (Release and optionally Release.gpg), so tools like apt know what is available and where to get it from. It will keep track which file belongs to where and remove files no longer needed (unless told to not do so). It can also make (partial) partial mirrors of remote repositories, including merging multiple sources and automatically (if explicitly requested) removing packages no longer available in the source. And many other things (sometimes I fear it got a few features too much).

What reprepro needs

It needs some libraries (zlib, libgpgme, libdb (Version 3, 4.3 or 4.4)) and can be compiled with some more for additional features (libarchive, libbz2). Otherwise it only needs apt's methods (only when downloading stuff), gpg (only when signing or checking signatures), and if compiled without libarchive it needs tar and ar installed.
If you tell reprepro to call scripts for you, you will of course need the interpreters for these scripts: The included example to generate pdiff files needs python. The example to extract changelogs needs dpkg-source.

What this manual aims to do

This manual aims to give some overview over the most important features, so people can use them and so that I do not implement something a second time because I forgot support is already there. For a full reference of all possible commands and config options take a look at the man page, as this manual might miss some of the more obscure options.

First steps

generate a repository with local packages

mirroring packages from other repositories

This example shows how to generate a mirror of a single architecture with all packages of etch plus security updates:

Repository basics

An apt-getable repository of Debian packages consists of two parts: the index files describing what is available and where it is and the actual Debian binary (.deb), installer binary (.udeb), and source (.dsc together with .tar.gz or .orig.tar.gz and .diff.gz) packages.
While you do not know how these look like to use reprepro, it's always a good idea to know what you are creating.

Index files

All index files are in subdirectories of a directory called dists. Apt is very decided what names those should have, including the name of dists. Including all optional and extensional files, the hierarchy looks like this:
dists
CODENAME
Each distribution has it's own subdirectory here, named by it's codename.
Release
This file describes what distribution this is and the checksums of all index files included.
Release.gpg
This is the optional detached gpg signature of the Release file. Take a look at the section about signing for how to active this.
Contents-ARCHITECTURE.gz
This optional file lists all files and which packages they belong to. It's downloaded and used by tools like apt-file to allow users to determine which package to install to get a specific file.
To activate generating of these files by reprepro, you need a Contents header in your distribution declaration.
COMPONENT1
Each component has it's own subdirectory here. They can be named whatever users can be bothered to write into their sources.list, but things like main, non-free and contrib are common. But funny names like bad or universe are just as possible.
source
If this distribution supports sources, this directory lists which source packages are available in this component.
Release
This file contains a copy of those information about the distribution applicable to this directory.
Sources
Sources.gz
Sources.bz2
These files contain the actual description of the source Packages. By default only the .gz file created, to create all three add the following to the declarations of the distributions: 
DscIndices Sources Release . .gz .bz2
That header can also be used to name those files differently, but then apt will no longer find them...
Sources.diff
This optional directory contains diffs, so that only parts of the index file must be downloaded if it changed. While reprepro cannot generate these so-called pdiffs itself, it ships both with a program called rredtool and with an example python script to generate those.
binary-ARCHITECTURE
Each architecture has its own directory in each component.
Release
This file contains a copy of those information about the distribution applicable to this directory.
Packages
Packages.gz
Packages.bz2
These files contain the actual description of the binary Packages. By default only the uncompressed and .gz files are created. To create all three, add the following to the declarations of the distributions: 
DebIndices Packages Release . .gz .bz2
That header can also be used to name those files differently, but then apt will no longer find them...
Packages.diff
This optional directory contains diffs, so that only parts of the index file must be downloaded if it changed. While reprepro cannot generate these so-called pdiffs itself, it ships both with a program called rredtool and with an example python script to generate those.
debian-installer
This directory contains information about the .udeb modules for the Debian-Installer. Those are actually just a very stripped down form of normal .deb packages and this the hierarchy looks very similar:
binary-ARCHITECTURE
Packages
Packages.gz
COMPONENT2
There is one dir for every component. All look just the same.
SUITE -> CODENAME
To allow accessing distribution by function instead of by name, there are often symbolic links from suite to codenames. That way users can write 
deb http://some.domain.tld/debian SUITE COMPONENT1 COMPONENT2
instead of 
deb http://some.domain.tld/debian CODENAME COMPONENT1 COMPONENT2
in their /etc/apt/sources.list and totally get surprised by getting something new after a release.

Package pool

While the index files have a required filename, the actual files are given just as relative path to the base directory you specify in your sources list. That means apt can get them no matter what scheme is used to place them. The classical way Debian used till woody was to just put them in subdirectories of the binary-ARCHITECTURE directories, with the exception of the architecture-independent packages, which were put into a artificial binary-all directory. This was replaced for the official repository with package pools, which reprepro also uses. (Actually reprepro stores everything in pool a bit longer than the official repositories, that's why it recalculates all filenames without exception).
In a package pool, all package files of all distributions in that repository are stored in a common directory hierarchy starting with pool/, only separated by the component they belong to and the source package name. As everything this has disadvantages and advantages: Now let's look at the actual structure of a pool (there is currently no difference between the pool structure of official Debian repositories and those generated by reprepro):
pool
The directory all this resides in is normally called pool. That's nowhere hard coded in apt but that only looks at the relative directory names in the index files. But there is also no reason to name it differently.
COMPONENT1
Each component has it's own subdirectory here. They can be named whatever users can be bothered to write into their sources.list, but things like main, non-free and contrib are common. But funny names like bad or universe are just as possible.
a
As there are really many different source packages, the directory would be too full when all put here. So they are separated in different directories. Source packages starting with lib are put into a directory named after the first four letters of the source name. Everything else is put in a directory having the first letter as name.
asource
Then the source package name follows. So this directory pool/COMPONENT1/a/asource/ would contain all files of different versions of the hypothetical package asource.
asource
a-source_version.dsc
a-source_version.tar.gz
The actual source package consists of its description file (.dsc) and the files references by that.
binary_version_ARCH1deb
binary_version_ARCH2.deb
binary2_version_all.deb
di-module_version_ARCH1.udeb
Binary packages are stored here to. So to know where a binary package is stored you need to know what its source package name is.
liba
As described before packages starting with lib are not stored in l but get a bit more context.
COMPONENT2
There is one dir for every component. All look just the same.
As said before, you don't need to know this hierarchy in normal operation. reprepro will put everything to where it belong, keep account what is there and needed by what distribution or snapshot, and delete files no longer needed. (Unless told otherwise or when you are using the low-level commands).

Config files

Configuring a reprepro repository is done by writing some config files into a directory. This directory is currently the conf subdirectory of the base directory of the repository, unless you specify --confdir or set the environment variable REPREPRO_CONFIG_DIR.
options
If this file exists, reprepro will consider each line an additional command line option. Arguments must be in the same line after an equal sign. Options specified on the command line take precedence.
distributions
This is the main configuration file and the only that is needed in all cases. It lists the distributions this repository contains and their properties.
See First steps for a short example or the manpage for a list of all possible fields.
updates
Rules about where to download packages from other repositories. See the section Mirroring / Updating for more examples or the man page for a full reference.
pulls
Rules about how to move packages in bulk between distributions where to download packages from other repositories. See the section Propagation of packages for an example or the man page for full reference.
incoming
Rules for incoming queues as processed by processincoming. See Processing an incoming queue for more information.

Generation of index files

Deciding when to generate

As reprepro stores all state in its database, you can decide when you want them to be written to the dists/ directory. You can always tell reprepro to generate those files with the export command: 
reprepro -b $YOURBASEDIR export $CODENAMES
This can be especially useful, if you just edited conf/distributions and want to test what it generates.

While that command regenerates all files, in normal operation reprepro will only regenerate files where something just changed or that are missing. With --export option you can control when this fill happen:

never
Don't touch any index files. This can be useful for doing multiple operations in a row and not wanting to regenerate the indices all the time. Note that unless you do an explicit export or change the same parts later without that option, the generated index files may be permanently out of date.
silent-never
Like never, but be more silent about it.
changed
This is the default behaviour since 3.0.1. Only export distributions where something changed (and no error occurred that makes an inconsistent state likely). And in those distributions only (re-)generate files which content should have been changed by the current action or which are missing.
lookedat
New name for normal since 3.0.1.
normal
This was the default behaviour until 3.0.0 (changed in 3.0.1). In this mode all distributions are processed that were looked at without error (where error means only errors happening while the package was open so have a chance to cause strange contents). This ensures that even after a operation that had nothing to do the looked at distribution has all the files exported needed to access it. (But still only files missing or that content would change with this action are regenerated).
force
Also try to write the current state if some error occurred. In all other modes reprepro will not write the index files if there was a problem. While this keeps the repository usable for users, it means that you will need an explicit export to write possible other changes done before that in the same run. (reprepro will tell you that at the end of the run with error, but you should not miss it).

Distribution specific fields

There are a lot of conf/distributions headers to control what index files to generate for some distribution, how to name them, how to postprocess them and so on. The most important are:

Fields for the Release files

The following headers are copied verbatim to the Release file, if they exist: Origin, Label, Codename, Suite, Architectures (excluding a possible value "source"), Components, Description, and NotAutomatic, ButAutomaticUpgrades.

Choosing compression and file names

Depending on the type of the index files, different files are generated. No specifying anything is equivalent to: 
 DscIndices Sources Release .gz
 DebIndices Packages Release . .gz
 UDebIndices Packages . .gz
This means to generate Release, Sources.gz for sources, Release, Packages and Packages.gz for binaries and Packages and Packages.gz for installer modules.
The format of these headers is the name of index file to generate, followed by the optional name for a per-directory release description (when no name is specified, no file is generated). Then a list of compressions: A single dot (.) means generating an uncompressed index, .gz means generating a gzipped output, while .bz2 requests and bzip2ed file. (.bz2 is not available when disabled at compile time). After the compressions a script can be given that is called to generate/update additional forms, see "Additional index files".

Signing

If there is a SignWith header, reprepro will try to generate a Release.gpg file using libgpgme. If the value of the header is yes it will use the first key it finds, otherwise it will give the option to libgpgme to determine the key. (Which means fingerprints and keyids work fine, and whatever libgpgme supports, which might include most that gpg supports to select a key).
The best way to deal with keys needing passphrases is to use gpg-agent. The only way to specify which keyring to use is to set the GNUPGHOME environment variable, which will effect all distributions.

Contents files

Reprepro can generate files called dists/CODENAME/Contents-ARCHITECTURE.gz listing all files in all binary packages available for the selected architecture in that distribution and which package they belong to.
This file can either be used by humans directly or via downloaded and searched with tools like apt-file.
To activate generating of these files by reprepro, you need a Contents header in that distribution's declaration in conf/distributions, like: 
Contents:
Versions before 3.0.0 need a ratio number there, like: 
Contents: 1
The number is the inverse ratio of not yet looked at and cached files to process in every run. The larger the more packages are missing. 1 means to list everything.
The arguments of the Contents field and other fields control which Architectures to generate Contents files for and which Components to include in those. For example 
Contents: udebs nodebs . .gz .bz2
ContentsArchitectures: ia64
ContentsComponents:
ContentsUComponents: main
means to not skip any packages, generate Contents for .udeb files, not generating Contents for .debs. Also it is only generated for the ia64 architecture and only packages in component main are included.

Additional index files (like .diff)

Index files reprepro cannot generate itself, can be generated by telling it to call a script.
using rredtool to generate pdiff files
Starting with version 4.1.0, the rredtool coming with reprepro can be used as hook to create and update Packages.diff/Index files.
Unlike dak (which created the official Debian repositories) or the pdiff.py script (see below) derived from dak, an user will only need to download one of those patches, as new changes are merged into the old files.
To use it, make sure you have diff and gzip installed. Then add something like the following to the headers of the distributions that should use this in conf/distributions: 
 DscIndices: Sources Release . .gz /usr/bin/rredtool
 DebIndices: Packages Release . .gz /usr/bin/rredtool
the pdiff example hook script (generates pdiff files)
This example generates Packages.diff and/or Sources.diff directories containing a set of ed-style patches, so that people do not redownload the whole index for just some small changes.
To use it, copy pdiff.example from the examples directory into your conf directory. (or any other directory, then you will need to give an absolute path later). Unpack, if needed. Rename it to pdiff.py and make it executable. Make sure you have python3-apt, diff and gzip installed. Then add something like the following to the headers of the distributions that should use this in conf/distributions: 
 DscIndices: Sources Release . .gz pdiff.py
 DebIndices: Packages Release . .gz pdiff.py
More information can be found in the file itself. You should read it.
the bzip2 example hook script
This is an very simple example. Simple and mostly useless, as reprepro has built in .bz2 generation support, unless you compiled it your own with --without-libbz2 or with no libbz2-dev installed.
To use it, copy bzip.example from the examples directory into your conf directory. (or any other directory, then you will need to give an absolute path later). Unpack, if needed. Rename it to bzip2.sh and make it executable. Then add something like the following to the headers of the distributions that should use this in conf/distributions: 
 DscIndices: Sources Release . .gz bzip2.sh
 DebIndices: Packages Release . .gz bzip2.sh
 UDebIndices: Packages . .gz bzip2.sh
The script will compress the index file using the bzip2 program and tell reprepro which files to include in the Release file of the distribution.
internals
TO BE CONTINUED

...

TO BE CONTINUED

Local packages

There are two ways to get packages not yet in any repository into yours.
includedsc, includedeb, include
These are for including packages at the command line. Many options are available to control what actually happens. You can easily force components, section and priority and/or choose to include only some files or only in specific architectures. (Can be quite useful for architecture all packages depending on some packages you will some time before building for some of your architectures). Files can be moved instead of copied and most sanity checks overwritten. They are also optimized towards being fast and simply try things instead of checking a long time if they would succeed.
processincoming
This command checks for changes files in an incoming directory. Being optimized for automatic processing (i.e. trying to checking everything before actually doing anything), it can be slower (as every file is copied at least once to sure the owner is correct, with multiple partitions another copy can follow). Component, section and priority can only be changed via the distribution's override files. Every inclusion needs a .changes file.
This method is also relatively new (only available since 2.0.0), thus optimisation for automatic procession will happen even more.

Including via command line

There are three commands to directly include packages into your repository: includedeb, includedsc and includechanges. Each needs to codename of the distribution you want to put your package into as first argument and a file of the appropriate type (.deb, .dsc or .changes, respectively) as second argument.
If no component is specified via --component (or short -C), it will be guessed looking at its section and the components of that distribution.
If there are no --section (or short -S) option, and it is not specified by the (binary or source, depending on the type) override file of the distribution, the value from the .changes-file is used (if the command is includechanges) or it is extracted out of the file (if it is a .deb-file, future versions might also try to extract it from a .dsc's diff or tarball).
Same with the priority and the --priority (or short -P) option.
With the --architecture (or short -A) option, the scope of the command is limited to that architecture. includdeb will add a Architecture all packages only to that architecture (and complain about Debian packages for other architectures). include will do the same and ignore packages for other architectures (source packages will only be included if the value for --architecture is source).
To limit the scope to a specify type of package, use the --packagetype or short -T option. Possible values are deb, udeb and dsc.
When using the --delete option, files will be moved or deleted after copying them. Repeating the --delete option will also delete unused files.
TO BE CONTINUED.

Processing an incoming queue

Using the processincoming command reprepro can automatically process incoming queues. While this is still improveable (reprepro still misses ways to send mails and especially an easy way to send rejection mails to the uploader directly), it makes it easy to have an directory where you place your packages and reprepro will automatically include them.
To get this working you need three things:

The file conf/incoming

 describes the different incoming queues. As usual the different chunks are separated by empty lines. Each chunk can have the following fields:
Name
This is the name of the incoming queue, that processincoming wants as argument.
IncomingDir
The actual directory to look for .changes files.
TempDir
To ensure integrity of the processed files and their permissions, every file is first copied from the incoming directory to this directory. Only the user reprepro runs as needs write permissions here. It speeds things up if this directory is in the same partition as the pool.
Allow
This field lists the distributions this incoming queue might inject packages into. Each item can be a pair of a name of a distribution to accept and a distribution to put it into. Each upload has each item in its Distribution: field compared first to last to each of this items and is put in the first distribution accepting it. For example 
Allow: stable>etch stable>etch-proposed-updates mystuff unstable>sid
will put a .changes file with Distribution: stable into etch. If that is not possible (e.g. because etch has a UploadersList option not allowing this) it will be put into etch-proposed-updates. And a .changes file with Distribution: unstable will be put into sid, while with Distribution: mystuff will end up in mystuff.
If there is a Default field, the Allow field is optional.
Default
Every upload not caught by an item of the Allow field is put into the distribution specified by this.
If there is a Allow field, the Default field is optional.
Multiple
This field only makes a difference if a .changes file has multiple distributions listed in its Distribution: field. Without this field each of those distributions is tried according to the above rules until the package is added to one (or none accepts it). With this field it is tried for each distribution, so a package can be upload to multiple distributions at the same time.
Permit
A list of options to allow things otherwise causing errors. (see the manpage for possible values).
This field os optional.
Cleanup
Determines when and what files to delete from the incoming queue. By default only successfully processed .changes files and the files references by those are deleted. For a list of possible options take a look into the man page.
This field os optional.

conf/distribution for processincoming

 There are no special requirements on the conf/distribution file by processincoming. So even a simple 
Codename: mystuff
Architectures: i386 source
Components: main non-free contrib bad
will work.
The Uploaders field can list a file limiting uploads to this distribution to specific keys and AlsoAcceptFor is used to resolve unknown names in conf/incoming's Allow and Default fields.

Getting processincoming called.

 While you can just call reprepro processincoming manually, having an incoming queue needing manual intervention takes all the fun out of having an incoming queue, so usually so automatic way is chosen: